Random thoughts of a computer scientist who is working behind the enemy lines; and lately turned into a double agent.

Friday, February 26, 2016

The Decline of Amazon Mechanical Turk

It seems that after years of neglect, Mechanical Turk starts losing its appeal. In our latest measurement, we see Mechanical Turk losing 50% of its requesters in a YoY measurement.

A few days ago, Kristy Milland (aka SpamGirl) asked me if there is a way to see the active requesters on Mechanical Turk over time. I did not have this dashboard on Mechanical Turk tracker, but it was an important metric, so I decided to add it in the MTurk Tracker website.

So, now MTurk Tracker has a tab called "Active Requesters" which shows how many requesters are "active" on Mechanical Turk at any given time. The definition of "Active at time X" means "had a task that was running on MTurk before time X and after time X".

Here is the chart for the active requesters between Jan 1, 2015 and February 28, 2016:

As you can see, starting March 2016 (that is before the announcement of price increases), we see a decline in the number of active requesters. Interestingly, when the fee increases are announced, we see a small "valley" around the period of fee increases. The numbers remain stable until November, but after that we see a steady decline.

Overall, we observe a YoY decline of almost 50% in terms of active requesters.

What is driving the decline? Hard to tell. Perhaps requesters abandon crowdsourcing in favor of more automated solutions, such as deep learning. Perhaps requesters with long running jobs build their own workforce (eg using UpWork). Perhaps they use alternative platforms, such as Crowdflower. Or perhaps my own metric is flawed, and I need to revise it.

But, unless we have a bug in the code, the future does not seem promising for Mechanical Turk. And this is a shame.